(The Epoch Times)—Protests that began in France have spread across much of Europe, drawing young people into the streets in growing numbers and unsettling investors watching for signs of political instability.
What started as demonstrations over the cost of living, housing, and cuts to education and social services has broadened into a wider expression of frustration over Europe’s sluggish economy and the limited prospects for a better life facing younger generations. In several cities, rallies have turned violent, with images of looted shops and burning streets topping media headlines and contributing to a flight from European bonds into perceived havens such as U.S. Treasuries.
The grievances vary by country. In Paris and Brussels, protesters have focused on inflation, education cuts, and pressure on social services. In Madrid and Frankfurt, housing affordability has been central. In Italy, demonstrators have pointed to weak wage growth and limited career opportunities. In Albania and Serbia, anger has centered on corruption.
The unrest has since expanded beyond young people. Older demonstrators have joined rallies against income inequality, pollution, increases in the retirement age in France, and proposed military-service requirements in Germany.
“Europe remains among the world’s most prosperous regions, with strong welfare institutions,” Grigoris Nikitas, an Athens-based political analyst, told The Epoch Times.
“Yet thousands are taking to the streets because they feel that prosperity is no longer translating into economic opportunity.”
For many young Europeans, he said, the fear is that they will be worse off than their parents.
Growth Gap
Europe remains wealthy compared with many regions of the world. Still, its growth has lagged behind the United States, limiting job creation and the fiscal resources governments need to sustain welfare programs.
The eurozone’s real gross domestic product (GDP) grew 1.4 percent in 2025, compared with 2.2 percent in the United States, according to World Bank data. France’s economy contracted in the first quarter of 2026, while Germany and Italy posted only marginal growth, Eurostat reported.
The weakness is reflected in youth employment. Unemployment among people under 25 stands at 15.4 percent in the eurozone and 15.5 percent across the European Union, according to Eurostat. In the United States, the comparable rate is 9.9 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.
Slow growth is also straining public finances. Governments are under pressure to fund pensions, healthcare, education, and housing while managing large debt burdens. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 115.7 percent, while Italy’s is 136.7 percent, according to Eurostat.
Those fiscal limits have helped turn economic grievances into political ones. Many young Europeans face fewer services, higher living expenses, and diminished expectations compared with previous generations.
Europe’s Affordability Squeeze
Another factor behind younger Europeans’ diminished expectations is an affordability squeeze.
Direct comparisons between Europe and the United States are complicated. Americans often face higher out-of-pocket costs for healthcare, university tuition, and housing. Europeans, by contrast, generally benefit from generous public services and subsidized education and health systems.
But for young workers, the right metric of affordability isn’t just headlining consumer prices. It is how much discretionary income is left after rent, taxes, energy bills, transportation, and food. By that metric, many European cities have become too difficult to live in.
Energy prices are a major burden, with both households and businesses facing higher electricity and natural-gas prices than those in the United States, a gap that expanded after the cut of cheap Russian gas supplies, the adoption of less reliable renewable sources of energy, and tighter environmental regulations.
High consumption taxes collected by the EU also add to the cost of living. Value-added taxes (VAT), which are embedded in consumer prices, commonly exceed 20 percent in many European countries. The United States has no federal VAT, and state and local sales taxes lag behind the European VAT rates.
Industrial Strains
Europe’s economic stagnation has been worsened by the hollowing out of its industrial base, the relocation of production overseas, and regulations that have raised costs for domestic manufacturers.
The auto industry has become a symbol of that pressure. European Union mandates to speed the transition to cleaner vehicles helped accelerate demand for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. But Chinese makers of new-energy vehicles – which include battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and fuel-cell vehicles – have gained ground in European markets, forcing domestic producers to race to catch up.
Living at Home Longer
The economic squeeze is visible in household patterns. In 2025, young people in the EU left their parents’ homes at an average age of 26.3, up slightly from 26.2 in 2024, according to Eurostat. The figure has hovered around 26 since 2002.
In parts of southern and southeastern Europe, the age is much higher. Young adults left home at an average age of 31.5 in Croatia, 30.9 in Greece and Slovakia, and 30.2 in Spain and Italy. In Finland, Denmark, Estonia, and Lithuania, the average was closer to the early 20s.
For many young workers, rent and mortgage costs have risen faster than wages, delaying independence and feeding resentment toward political systems they see as unresponsive.
Stathis Giannikos, president of the Pushkin Institute, said Europe’s youth unrest also has cultural roots.
“European generations were raised in consumer societies, accustomed to entitlements that sluggish economies can no longer support,” he told The Epoch Times.
Nikitas said another source of tension is the failure of some European societies to integrate immigrants into the broader social and economic fabric.
“When France needed immigrant labor during the industrial era, it built housing on the outskirts to solve the problem of affordable living,” he said. “Today, unemployment and lack of infrastructure have turned some of these areas into breeding grounds for parallel societies.”
Even when national economies improve, he said, young people in those neighborhoods often see little chance of upward mobility.
A Human-Capital Crisis
Patrizia Porrini, a professor of management at Long Island University, said the unrest should be understood as both an economic and human-capital crisis.
“Young people – primarily students, recent graduates, and early-career workers – are mobilizing against chronic underinvestment in education, housing costs that consume a large share of entry-level wages, and a cost-of-living squeeze,” she told The Epoch Times.
Broader global pressures, including higher energy and food costs, have added to the frustration, she said.
Porrini said the protests also warn governments about spending priorities. Public systems that support future productivity – schools, universities, and affordable housing – are competing with rising military and security expenditures. In Germany, the Gen Z Regelt (Gen Z Takes Charge) movement has included opposition to compulsory military service among its demands, along with calls for greater investment in education.
The unrest, she said, reflects a generation no longer willing to wait quietly.
“Silence and patient watching while daily welfare undergoes a slow, decades-long erosion will not be tolerated,” Porrini said.
For Europe’s leaders, the challenge is that many of the protesters’ demands require money that governments may not have, reforms voters may resist, and growth the continent has struggled to deliver.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
